Catalysing Scholarship of Assessment using Programme Assessment Plan

Assessment practice in general can answer important questions about the learning of individual students, the effectiveness of a single course or programme, or even the entire institution as a whole. Currently, it is widely discussed with regard to how assessment could be used in attaining unexpected learning outcomes on the part of the students themselves. This paper will seminally discuss the importance of a Programme Assessment Plan and how university engineering lecturers could utilize it as a learning aid, thereby promoting learning throughout life. In ensuring the enculturation of scholarship of assessment among the National University of Malaysia engineering lecturers, it is argued that assessment should be acknowledged as a major influence on student learning in all course design and development. Additionally, assessment should be judged first in terms of its consequences on students’ learning and second in terms of its effectiveness in measuring students’ achievement. This paper ends by proposing steps and measures that should be undertaken in preparing Programme Assessment Plan, which tacitly inform the learning processes that should be undertaken in achieving its underlined outcomes, while at the same time contributing towards continuous quality improvement on part of the programme itself.